


355. broken past

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [272]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 12:25:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10490850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: They are walking through the city in the dark. Sarah hasn’t asked where they’re going; she’s cold, by the looks of it, just that thin top all soaked through with sweat. Helena doesn’t have a jacket to offer her, just this wedding dress. Helena wants to throw an arm over her shoulders, so they could both be less cold, but the way Sarah is standing – no.Sarah won’t even ask where they’re going. It’s good, but also it isn’t.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sanetwin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanetwin/gifts).



> [warning: reference to torture]
> 
> HAPPY BIRTHDAY SAM

Sarah after Rachel: shell- _shocked_ , her brain the clattering of empty bullets on the ground. She isn’t Sarah the way Helena is used to knowing her; she’s smaller, hollowed out. Helena sees empty bullets in every piece of her, all the places the threat should be. Sarah small in the elevator of Rachel’s building. Sarah holding a cloth to her neck, to stop the bleeding. It’s the first time Helena has looked at Sarah and thought: well, maybe Sarah could make it easy. Maybe this time it could be easy.

They are walking through the city in the dark. Sarah hasn’t asked where they’re going; she’s cold, by the looks of it, just that thin top all soaked through with sweat. Helena doesn’t have a jacket to offer her, just this wedding dress. Helena wants to throw an arm over her shoulders, so they could both be less cold, but the way Sarah is standing – no.

Sarah won’t even ask where they’re going. It’s good, but also it isn’t.

Sarah leaning against the wall, shivering in the rain. Helena gets down on her knees and works the padlock attached to the bright red garage door; she doesn’t have a key anymore, but she can pick this lock the way she picked Rachel’s. Click and click and done, and the door rattles open. Helena puts her hand on Sarah’s arm and steers her inside.

It smells so familiar in here: dust and books and old perfume. Helena’s bike is just where she left it, and she trails her fingers over it while her other hand stays flat on Sarah’s arm. Over to the cot. Sarah sits down on the edge of it without prompting, like a child. Helena doesn’t realize until Sarah is sitting there that she’d wanted Sarah to object to this, ask questions, say _something_. Helena misses her sister. She’s been missing Sarah for a long time, and it seems strange to miss her while she’s here. But she does.

She crouches in front of Sarah and pulls off her boots, one at a time.

“Helena,” Sarah says at last, voice like stained glass shattering.

“Shh,” Helena says. “Go to sleep. Things are better in the morning.”

“Where are we,” Sarah says.

“Shh,” Helena says.

“It hurts,” Sarah says.

“It stops,” Helena says, leaning towards the bed so that her eyes are the level of Sarah’s eyes. “I promise that it stops.”

Sarah looks at her. Wide eyes. Baby-eyes. Helena wants to break Rachel’s man again, as if that would fix this. Very slowly she reaches out and tugs Sarah’s hand away from her neck, presses gently against her fingers.

“Sleep,” she says.

Sarah’s gaze darts around the room, the dark of it. “I can’t,” she says.

“I will stay,” Helena says. “Nobody will touch you, _sestra_. I promise this.”

“I killed you,” Sarah says.

“No you didn’t.”

Sarah nods, like this is enough, and slowly lies down on the cot. Her eyes are open until they aren’t. As soon as her eyelids droop she starts shaking, like a switch flicked on a machine somewhere. Helena tugs blankets over her, all the blankets she can find, until Sarah isn’t so small anymore. Then Helena stands back up.

Here they are, in Maggie’s locker. Helena had wanted to bring Sarah here for such a long time – ever since she realized, really, that they were connected. She wanted to show Sarah this place. Instead she showed her Maggie’s apartment, which may or may not have worked better. They’re here, aren’t they? So maybe things worked out after all.

Old matchboxes go in the pile next to the cassette tapes, and Helena flicks a match to life and starts praying. So many of the candles in the locker have saints on them, so that Helena had to pray in order to have light. (Maggie was very good at that sort of thing, making puzzles for Helena, making tests.) She doesn’t know what to say anymore, but she tries anyways – less for herself, more so Sarah won’t have to wake up in the dark. _Please look after her. Please don’t hurt her anymore. You can hurt me instead, but please don’t hurt Sarah anymore_.

Once the candles are lit Helena settles. She reaches over Sarah to grab a handful of candy – she had some next to the cot, she always did – and puts a piece of bright sugar into her mouth. When she rolls it around, her mouth tastes like sunlight and dust; the candy is old. Helena keeps sucking on it anyways until the dust clears, and she carefully moves dolls off of the chair next to the cot. So many broken dolls. So many broken things, here. It was best she didn’t bring Sarah here too early. This comes too close to Sarah knowing her.

Helena sits in the chair, curls up; if she droops her head right her nose is tilted away from the wedding dress, and she doesn’t have to smell its stale perfume. She has to stay awake for Sarah, but – she smothered Gracie today, she killed a man today, she walked and walked and ran today and now she is: exhausted. She has to stay awake for Sarah, so Sarah can be safe. She falls asleep anyways.

* * *

Sarah wakes up with no idea where she is. Everything smells like dust and tinny, artificial flowers. It’s terrible. She coughs, and the cough makes her neck sting, and then she remembers: Daniel, Helena, Helena, the knife, Daniel, the razor, the knife. She sits bolt upright. A collection of dolls leer at her, but she’s learned better in the last twelve hours: she doesn’t scream. She just looks wildly around, chest heaving with silent breaths.

Dolls. Candles. Dolls. Candles—

Helena, curled up and frowning in a chair. Sarah’s heartrate slows at the sight of her, for a reason she doesn’t even know. Her shoulders lower. Her body, apparently, is an idiot.

Helena brought her here; Sarah slots that fact into her brain and looks around again. It’s a shithole for sure. There’s a pile of candy next to the bed she’s sitting on, broken dolls and old pictures of scratched-up saints. At the edge of the circle of candlelight Sarah is in, she can see a passport with her face on it.

Oh. This is Helena’s home, isn’t it. This is where she lived.

The realization is terrible. Thinking about Helena sleeping here, lying in this bed and dreaming about Sarah, is terrible. Those dolls: terrible. Helena flipping through passports under this ratty crocheted blanket, sucking on one of those candies – Helena praying in the dark – Helena looking at Sarah, stunned and bleeding, and bringing her here, and giving Sarah her _bed_ —

Numbly Sarah unwraps a piece of candy and puts it in her mouth. It tastes too sweet to be real – it’s disgusting – she sucks on it anyways. She watches Helena asleep, how still Helena is when she dreams.

Slowly Sarah stands up from the bed, hugging her arms around herself in the sudden cold of the room. There’s a candelabra, wax running down the sides; she takes it, steps softly around Helena’s sleeping body and into the dark unknown. Grates rise from her out of the shadows – that, and more junk. Wooden pallets and gasoline cans. Paperback novels all covered in dust. Dolls, god, everywhere those stupid terrible broken dolls.

There’s a bike waiting patiently in the dark, and beyond that: a door. One of those big rolling ones. There’s no way to pull it open without waking Helena up, but Helena would be disoriented enough after waking that Sarah could make a run for it. Out into the cold. Running away from Helena again, hoping she’ll only catch up when Sarah needs her to.

When she turns around Helena’s eyes are glittering sleepily in the candlelight. She didn’t even move. Sarah has no idea when she woke up, how long she’s been watching Sarah try to leave her.

“What is this,” Sarah says.

Helena sits up; her bones crack. She hugs her legs to her chest. Underneath the dress she is wearing, incongruously, cowboy boots. “Maggie’s locker,” she says. “I did not know where else to bring you. You were…” she fiddles with her fingers, doesn’t say anything else.

 _Thank you_ , Sarah thinks, but she can’t make the words come out of her mouth.

“Why,” she says instead. “Why – why any of this.”

“You are all I have,” Helena says, with the patient air of someone repeating instructions. Then that attitude drops, and she presses her face to her knees. “You were scared. I have been scared before also. I was never scared. Here.”

She isn’t looking at Sarah anymore. Sarah walks back into the candlelight, puts the candelabra back, sits down on the bed. Helena immediately drops out of the chair she’s sitting on, sits on the floor across from Sarah. Her eyes are intent on the pile of candy behind Sarah; Sarah picks up a piece, passes it over to her. While Helena is busy unwrapping it Sarah lifts up the pillow from the bed to put behind her back.

There’s a sniper rifle case, behind the pillow. Unlike everything else in this locker, there is no dust on it.

Sarah looks at the rifle. After a while, the wrapper-wrinkling stops. “Oh,” Helena says.

“Oh,” Sarah echoes. She didn’t want the gun to be there. But it’s there. She wishes it wasn’t.

“I want to be different,” Helena says. Sarah looks back towards Helena. The candles are starting to run out; the light on Helena is patchy, dim. She glows in it anyways. When she talks, her mouth shines red from the hard candy. “God gave me another chance. I want to be with you. And – and the others. I want to try again. The other way, this time.” She looks down and starts patiently smoothing out the candy wrapper. The feeling in Sarah’s chest is too sad, probably, to be relief. She pretends it is anyways.

“You saved my life,” Sarah says warily. Helena nods without looking up. Her lips are sucked between her teeth; she is folding the candy wrapper precisely, her fingers so strangely delicate on the thin piece of paper.

Sarah props the pillow against the box the candy was piled on, leans on that. “We’re gonna have to take it slow,” she says, voice slow and cautious where it spools out between her teeth. “I need – I need to be _sure_ , Helena.”

Helena looks up. “But you will,” she says. “I mean. Um. You will – I can. I can come with you.”

“Yeah,” Sarah croaks. “You can come with me.”

When Helena smiles, she looks so young. Sarah twitches the corner of her mouth back up at her, and she has no idea what she looks like.

“Hold out your hand,” Helena says.

“What?”

Helena gestures impatiently. Sarah holds out her hand, and Helena leans forward and drops something into it. She folds Sarah’s hand back around it and leans back again. All the candles are going out, now; Sarah can barely see anything. She has to bring her hand close to her face to even see what’s in it.

It’s a fortune teller. It’s so small. _Kira folded angels_ , Sarah thinks of telling Helena. _Kira folded you_. But she has time, to tell Helena that. It doesn’t have to be now.

“What’s inside of it,” she says.

“Nothing,” Helena says, and laughs.

“Something funny?”

“There’s nothing there,” Helena says. “Inside of the future. All blank. No words.” She grins, white teeth in the dark, like Sarah should get the joke. God help her: she does, she gets it. In the middle of the black sea of memory she sees Helena guiding her through the city last night, the white figure of her leading Sarah step by step into an unknowable dark.

“Hilarious,” Sarah mutters, but she slips the fortune teller in her pocket anyways.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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